The Niagara News is the community newspaper of Niagara College located in Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It is created and produced by the students of the Niagara College Journalism program.

Niagara College theatre students attend Up Close and Personal seminar

By EUN JO Staff Writer“Keep fighting and believe in yourself in this hardest business in the world.”The theatre company Outside the March sent three of its principal members, Mitchell Cushman, Katharine Cullen and Amy Keating to the UP Close & Personal session of the Acting for Film and Television program recently.Founded in 2009 by Co-Artistic Director Mitchell Cushman and Simon Bloom as well as Co-Artistic Associates, Amy Keating, Sebastien Heins and Katharine Cullen, the company is dedicated to doing what the principals described as “original, immersive, Canadian theatre experiences”; doing it all with joy and hard work.Students attending the Oct. 9 session had a number of questions about the principals’ careers, expertise and the immersive play Vitals, which was made into a film and screened by the acting students and Emergency Medical Services students on Oct. 2. It was a great opportunity for them to prepare for the real world’s acting business.Young people prefer going to the cinema more than the theatre, so Outside the March is trying to make the theatre cool again. “We are trying to get young people into the theatre,” says Keating. She adds they are trying to make theatre more like film, more like going to the bar to have a good time and interact with friends and less like sitting sleeping in the dark in a movie theatre; they are making theatre audiences feel alive. The audiences can feel reality in the immersive play Vitals, which focuses on a female EMS worker who has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Co-Artistic Director Mitchell Cushman says directing a live performance and the film version of Vitals was a challenge to him.“We are giving the theatre audiences freedom to explore what is a huge space. In this case, the audiences were free to open up everything and take everything in” says Cushman of the house in which the theatre version of Vitals was performed.Cast as the main character ‘Anna’, Katharine Cullen researched a lot to understand PTSD. From reading books, to chatting with people who have PTSD and listening to radio discussions about PTSD, she invested effort and time to develop the character that she first portrayed in the live theatre version and then recorded on film in a high pressure 12-hour shoot. She says imagining a world she has never experienced is quite different from the real world.“What I thought would be most stressful and most difficult about their job turned out to be quite different than what I imagined. I knew that they are spending a whole day looking for emergencies,” says Cullen. “I read a couple books that are related to the job. It was really surprising because I really didn’t know how they work.”Being immersed in a role has an impact on the actor’s personal life. “When I woke up in the morning after the show every night, I didn’t feel super happy. I was psychologically healthy but I recognized I felt dark,” says Cullen. “I recognized it really impacted on me.”She indicated that students must keep studying their craft and remind themselves they can have opportunities. “I think the acting business is the hardest business to be in often for very little financial reward but keep fighting for what you want and believe in yourself,” says Keating.